The following article was published today, Wednesday, December 17, 2008 in the Sun Newspaper, covering San Bernardino and the Inland Empire by Staff Writer Josh Dualancy.<\/p>\n
RIALTO – The city welcomed its new fire chief Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Robert Espinosa stood proud inside the garage of Fire Station 201 as his wife, Laurie, pinned the badge on him in front of a crowd of about 75 friends, family and firefighters from the department he now commands.<\/p>\n
After a speech in which he touched on some of the highlights of more than three decades in what he deemed a “noble profession,” the 50-year-old Espinosa made a promise to those who are curious about his leadership style.<\/p>\n
“This is not going to be a solo fire chief show,” Espinosa said. “It’s going to be a cooperative effort by everybody to make sure we are doing what’s best for the department and what’s best for the city and what’s best for the citizens.”<\/p>\n
Espinosa takes the reins here after 24 years in the Long Beach Fire Department, where he capped his tenure as an assistant fire chief.<\/p>\n
He leads a department reeling from infighting such as arbitration hearings pitting some rank-and-file personnel against their bosses.<\/p>\n
But after a celebratory swearing-in, it was difficult to detect in Espinosa anything other than optimism about the department’s direction.<\/p>\n
“You can always improve on morale, and I think what you’re looking at is people that are very excited about change,”<\/p>\n
he said. “I think they’re very excited about the future, and new ideas and leadership.”<\/p>\n
And at least one colleague suggested that pressures from outside the department could prove more worrisome than those from within.<\/p>\n
“He’s taking leadership at a time when there’s no money,” said Jim Ballard, who served as interim chief from early July through last week. “That’s going to be a real challenge.”<\/p>\n
Both Ballard and Espinosa said budget woes locally and statewide will make for a difficult transition, but it can be navigated by more efficiently delivering service to the community.<\/p>\n
Ballard added that Espinosa has the experience to make it happen.<\/p>\n
“He’s decisive, knows where he’s going, knows how to get there,” Ballard said. “He has all the skills for the job. There’s no question about that.”<\/p>\n
Espinosa said one of his biggest accomplishments in Long Beach was negotiating a contract between the firefighters’ union and the city.<\/p>\n
The chief, who lives in Orange County, will work as a full-time employee at a rate of $14,441 a month, according to the city’s Human Resources Department.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The following article was published today, Wednesday, December 17, 2008 in the Sun Newspaper, covering San Bernardino and the Inland Empire by Staff Writer Josh Dualancy. RIALTO – The city welcomed its new fire chief Tuesday. Robert Espinosa stood proud inside the garage of Fire Station 201 as his wife, Laurie, pinned the badge on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=701"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":708,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions\/708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}